Buddha's Orphans, page 20
It was Raja who darted to the door and ushered in his mother-in-law, the woman who had until now refused to recognize him as her daughter’s husband. Muwa had seen the adult Raja only once before, soon after Nilu and Raja got married, at the Kamaladi Ganesh Temple. That morning, Nilu and Raja had been circling the temple during their morning walk when they came face to face with Muwa, who was on her way out of the shrine. “Oh,” said Muwa, her gaze falling upon the young man whom she’d last seen as a boy in her house. Raja, naturally, didn’t recognize her, but, judging from the discomfort on Nilu’s face, he immediately understood who she was. “Everything all right?” Muwa asked, and didn’t wait for an answer as she put on her slippers and walked away.
Today Muwa gave Raja a curt nod, then looked for a place to sit. Raja gestured toward the chair by the window, the place where he, until a few weeks ago, sat in the afternoons and watched the world go by. But Muwa ignored him and went to the bed against the wall. There she sat, forcing Raja to take the chair. Nilu hadn’t bothered to meet her mother’s eyes, and for a while the room became encased in silence, which Raja broke by declaring that he was going to make tea. Nilu nearly choked because Raja’s tea typically looked gray and tasted too sugary. Even during late pregnancy and right after Maitreya was born, Nilu herself had gotten up to put the kettle on. Now Muwa would get a taste of her undesirable son-in-law’s tea.
Unsmiling, her eyes fixed on the baby in her daughter’s lap, Muwa said, “No need for tea. I came to see the bachcha.” Not “my grandson,” but “the kid.” Muwa didn’t even bother asking what name they’d chosen for the baby, the name that would be formalized at his initiation ceremony in a few months.
“You didn’t have to come,” Nilu said.
“That’s not for you to decide,” Muwa said. She smelled minty; obviously she’d taken care of her breath before she came. But she looked worse than before: more lines on her face, slightly swollen cheeks, eyes retreating deeper into their sockets.
In the silence that ensued, Raja was the one who seemed the most nervous—as if Muwa’s impressions of the couple, of their flat, of their baby, with his puckered lips, mattered a great deal to him. Had fatherhood suddenly made Raja promote Muwa to the important role of grandmother, to the category of someone whose opinions mattered, despite the fact that she had ignored him and Nilu for so long? But this reaction was not unusual for Raja. Of the three mothers in his life, the one who shunned him was the one he pined for.
Nilu felt annoyed with him. Don’t act silly, she wanted to tell him. Don’t kowtow to Muwa.
Muwa kept her eyes focused on her daughter and the baby, then finally said, “I meant to come earlier, but Sumit . . .” She caught herself in time, cleared her throat, and said, “Everything all right? Your health is fine?”
Ah, Sumit. So he was still around. Nilu stated curtly, “There’s nothing wrong with my health.”
Outside someone belched out “Mehbooba Mehbooba” from the hit film Sholay, and nervously Raja began to whistle the tune, then stopped abruptly, embarrassed. Muwa was looking around the room, at the rotten wooden ceiling beams, the fist-sized hole right above the bed, the stove in the corner. Her disdain was obvious, and when her gaze stopped at Nilu, she seemed to be saying, What person in her right mind would want to leave a house like Nilu Nikunj to come live here?
Nilu met her gaze and hit back with her own unspoken retort: This is better than what you ever provided me.
“What name have you thought of for him?” Muwa finally asked.
“Maitreya,” Nilu said.
Muwa took a deep breath. “Hmmm. It’s not a name I’ve heard before.”
“We like it.”
Muwa nodded slowly. “That’s what’s important.”
“Muwa should go there and look at him,” Raja said. The distance from the bed to the wall, where Nilu sat, wasn’t more than a few feet, but Muwa made no attempt to traverse it. If Muwa had expected Nilu to stand and hand the baby over to her, Nilu thought, she had another idea coming. But Muwa didn’t signal such a desire, and the three of them remained quiet. Maitreya had finally latched on to his mother’s nipple and was sucking gently, his eyes shut.
“So, how much is the rent here?” Muwa asked.
“It’s adequate for us,” Nilu said.
“Have you taken some time off from the school right now? What is the name of your school again?”
“Yes, for a few days.”
“And you?” She addressed Raja. “You’ve found a job?”
“I work in a bookstore.”
“Bookstore?” Her face indicated clearly what she thought of bookstores.
“Right here in Thamel. I’m the assistant manager.”
Nilu wondered if part of Raja’s nervousness reflected his desire to prove to his mother-in-law that he was a capable provider. After all, for close to two years Raja had remained idle.
Nilu couldn’t tell whether Raja’s job title impressed Muwa, but her mother did say, “Well, I imagine jobs are hard to come by these days.”
“It’s a good job, Muwa,” Raja said, then mentioned some of the books popular with tourists and described some of his recent experiences and what Shakya-ji was like. His talkativeness grated on Nilu’s nerves, but Muwa, perhaps to compensate for how she’d treated Raja throughout his life, feigned interest. After Raja finished speaking, there was an uncomfortable silence.
Muwa finally broke it. “Well, you know there’s plenty of room in Nilu Nikunj. You don’t have to . . .” Muwa’s eyes surveyed the room. “Also, the servants are still there, so you won’t need to be with the baby twenty-four . . .” But making the offer had become too much for her, or she’d become afraid that they’d actually accept it, so she abruptly stood. “I should be going home now. Sumit will wonder what I’m up to.”
Muwa’s visit didn’t affect Nilu so much, for she was convinced that it was only out of some vague maternal duty that Muwa had come. “She didn’t even hold our Third Person, her own grandson,” she said to Raja.
But Raja was silent, and when he spoke, he said, “At least she took the first step of coming here. She’ll just need some time to come around, that’s all. The Third Person’s birth has done it, I can feel it.”
“She came here only because she felt obligated—and even this obligation must be a leftover from her past life. Just this much leftover.” She pinched her thumb and forefinger together to indicate how much.
“You’re being too harsh.”
Nilu was folding some pieces of cloth, cut from her old dresses, to use as Maitreya’s diapers. “How come you are a big Muwa supporter all of a sudden?”
“Nilu, you can’t always dredge up the past to apportion blame.”
“But it’s not only the past. Wasn’t she laughing when you mentioned your job today? Did you not notice it? Did she even look at her own grandson properly?”
“That’s just her personality, and as her daughter you should know this quite well. She’s getting old. I think she misses you.”
Nilu looked at him in wonder. “Are you then tempted by her invitation to live in Nilu Nikunj?”
“No, no,” he said, a bit too quickly, averting her eyes. “It was just a passing thought. I wasn’t thinking about us. Rather, about him.” He gestured toward the bed, where the baby, bundled up in an old shawl, was napping. He added, “There are moments I feel discouraged when I look around this flat. Look at us! What kind of life am I making you live? It has taken me months to find a job, and even I am not confident that I can hold it. God forbid if I end up losing this one!”
A knot had formed on Nilu’s forehead. “I didn’t know you were like this,” she said. “I didn’t know you would be willing to sell your dignity for . . . for Muwa’s bribe. That’s what she was trying to do—buy our affections by offering a life of comfort, and you have become seduced by it.” She picked up Maitreya from the bed, and she left the room. Soon Raja heard her steps on the staircase.
When she didn’t return in the next half-hour, he decided to go fetch her. He went downstairs, then emerged onto the street. He roamed the neighborhood, worried that Nilu was walking the streets with young Maitreya in her arms. Who knew what kind of illnesses a newborn could catch, exposed to the outside elements? She’d never walked out on him like this before, and he cursed himself for failing to appreciate the depth of her sensitivity toward Muwa’s indifference. What was he thinking? He really didn’t want to live with Muwa and her lover; he didn’t feel any urge to be close to Kaki; but he had been strangely attracted to the idea of Maitreya playing in the same yard where he, Raja, had played, albeit briefly, as a child, except that his son would be a master, not a servant.
He walked all the way to Thamel chowk, almost to Fishtail Books, which he was supposed to open shortly. Shakya-ji lived right above the bookstore, but he had told Raja that he hated it when he had to open the shop in the morning. For good reason: Shakya-ji smoked ganja late into the night, often with the American and European girls he befriended in his bookstore. At around noon he awoke and ambled down to the shop, where he took an hour to drink a cup of tea and read the newspaper before heading up again to shower and eat, and perhaps smoke another joint, before he emerged in the late afternoon or the evening, when he usually let Raja go.
Raja had only half an hour to eat and arrive at the bookstore. He didn’t want to displease Shakya-ji by opening the store late, so he returned to the flat, thinking he’d just munch on a piece or two of bread and go to work.
Nilu was in their kitchen, joined by Bhairavi. Maitreya was asleep on the bed.
“Where did you go?” Raja asked. “I was getting worried.”
“I was downstairs, at Bhairavi’s place.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Raja said. “I walked all the way to Thamel chowk looking for you.”
“Oh, such love,” Bhairavi said.
“Serves you right,” Nilu told Raja. “Who asked you to support Muwa over me?”
“I was just giving her the benefit of the doubt, that’s all. I have no intention of going to live in Nilu Nikunj.”
“Big fight this morning?” Bhairavi asked.
Nilu told her what had happened.
“How can a grandmother’s heart be like that?” Bhairavi exclaimed. “When I have my grandchildren, I’ll smother them with love.”
Her seven-year-old son came bounding up the stairs. He was obsessed with becoming a doctor when he grew up, an ambition that made his parents awfully proud. Now he came running to Raja, a plastic stethoscope around his neck, and asked if he could listen to Raja’s heart. Raja lay down on the rug, lifted up his shirt, and allowed the boy to apply the stethoscope to his chest.
After Bhairavi and her son left, Raja embraced Nilu and extracted a promise from her that she’d never leave him stranded like that. He couldn’t fight back the lump in his throat, and his voice broke as he said, “I don’t know what I’d do if you left me, Nilu.”
She stroked his face. “I’ll never leave you, sweetie.”
When Maitreya was two years old, Nilu and Raja moved to Chabel. The shift came about unexpectedly. As old and crumbling as their flat was in Thamel, they were happy there. They liked the landlady’s family and had become such good friends with Bhairavi that they didn’t want to think about living far from her. But whenever Ganga Da came to visit, he complained (he’d turned into such a complainer over the years) about their living conditions. He pointed out flaws in the flat: a new crack by the window; the electric wires dangerously close—an arm’s reach!—to the window; the ramshackle, unhygienic outhouse in the courtyard. “An outhouse in the middle of the city?” he exclaimed. “And that too in an area where Westerners flock? Why can’t your dear landlady build a modern indoor bathroom, with a commode and a flush and everything, like the rest of civilization?”
Raja and Nilu tried to hush him, fearing that the landlady would hear. Raja told Ganga Da that he and Nilu had no problem with the toilet in the courtyard. “It’s exhilarating, actually,” Raja said. “We get to smell fresh air as we conduct our morning business.”
“Yes, yes, keep joking,” Ganga Da said. “You’re going to let my grandson grow up in this hovel?” He was moving his right leg rapidly and twirling his thumbs on his lap. Nowadays he was forced to rush Jamuna Mummy to the mental hospital every few weeks, where she’d get electroconvulsive therapy. He complained that he was getting tired of handling Jamuna Mummy all by himself. Before, while Raja lived with them, she’d sober up when Raja scolded her, but these days nothing seemed to pacify her. She had become physically aggressive and frequently assaulted Ganga Da. The young muscular man Ganga Da had hired to help him control Jamuna Mummy had quit after a few days, saying that the job was beyond him. The medications that the doctors at the hospital had prescribed for her sometimes worked, but at other moments they were useless. Often Jamuna Mummy would simply refuse to take them. During one of her hospital stays the nurses had caught her exposing her breasts to two other patients, who were also in the process of undressing.
A few weeks after Maitreya’s birth, Raja and Nilu had taken him to Jamuna Mummy in the hospital, where in a general ward crowded with patients she was sleeping in a narrow bed under a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi. The hospital conditions had improved somewhat, but not a great deal, since that first time Ganga Da had brought his wife here, right after Kaki escaped to Nilu Nikunj with six-year-old Raja. The floor was cleaner, and the nurses regularly took the patients out to the yard for fresh air and exercise. But cots still served as beds, and patients slept in such close proximity that they had to climb over their neighbors to go to the nurses’ room or to visit the bathroom. The wilder patients were chained to corner poles or to heavy chairs.
Jamuna Mummy stared at the ceiling, unresponsive to Ganga Da’s exhortations. Just yesterday she’d received her electric shocks, they had learned.
“Your nati is here,” Ganga Da said to Jamuna Mummy. “Won’t you take a look at him? Look at his cute face, look at that nose. He looks just like Raja.”
Actually Maitreya’s face was a replica of Nilu’s: the same dimpled cheeks, the same small chin. But Ganga Da was trying hard to get Jamuna Mummy interested, and he wasn’t successful. It wasn’t until Raja leaned over her and said, “Jamuna Mummy, won’t you speak to me? I’ve come to see you after such a long time, and I’ve brought someone along with me,” that her eyes flickered and she turned her head slowly to look at him. She uttered a bunch of words no one understood.
Nilu held Maitreya up and said, “Jamuna Mummy, look!”
This time she did look and said, “Eh, where did this little goat come from? Like a goat he is, isn’t he? He’s going to grow a beard like a goat, he’s going to drop small round pellets like a goat, he’s going to go mhhhaaaa mhhhaaa like a goat.”
“Het!” Raja said. “You can’t call my child a goat. Maybe you yourself are a goat.”
“Don’t say that, Raja,” Jamuna Mummy said. “Don’t hurt your mother’s feelings like that.” Then she began to gently scold Raja for a number of incoherent reasons. “Don’t do such things, don’t bring a goat to my bed” were the last words they heard as they left her bedside.
Nilu sometimes wondered how long it would be before Ganga Da himself lost his grasp on reality. Physically something was happening to him. His abrupt hand gestures, his incessantly jiggling legs, the stubble that remained unshaved on his chin, his cloudy eyes—all these pointed to a man about to break down. When she’d expressed her concern to Raja, he’d dismissed it, saying that all his life he’d seen Ganga Da take care of Jamuna Mummy, and the man was used to it. “He’s just getting a bit older, Nilu,” Raja said. “He’s aging faster because dealing with a crazy wife is finally taking its toll.” Once again, she was struck by how casual, how dismissive he was about anything to do with his parents. It was as if nothing about them could require his intervention, or even his thought or worry.
“Ganga Da, we’re not going to move in with you, if that’s what you’re after,” Raja said one day, after Ganga Da pointed out more faults in their flat. “You already have your hands full with Jamuna Mummy, and we simply can’t subject Maitreya to her unpredictable behavior.”
“Who said I want you to move in with me?” Ganga Da said. “I gave up on that a long time ago. I have something else in mind. Now hear me fully before you say no.” He told them that he’d completed building the new house last year, a small, one-story house in Chabel that was now rented to a family. But his tenants were moving because the husband was being posted to Birgunj. Nothing would make Ganga Da happier than to have Nilu and Raja take possession of the house. He’d rather let his family live there than have it occupied by more strangers. “It doesn’t make sense that I have a house in Lainchour,” Ganga Da said, “and I have a house in Chabel, but my son and my daughter-in-law and my grandchild are living in a crummy flat where they have to make a mad dash to the yard if they have a diarrhea.”
“But Ganga Da,” Nilu said, “we don’t want to deprive you of your rent. God knows you need all the extra income for Jamuna Mummy’s treatment.”
Ganga Da sighed. “There you go again. Jamuna Mummy will always be Jamuna Mummy. But here you are, young parents, Raja just trying to build his career. The only thing I’m trying to do is give you two a boost, that’s all.”
“We’ll pay you rent,” Raja said.
“What?” Ganga Da looked aghast.
“We’ll pay you rent. That’s the only way we can stay in your house.”
“See?” Ganga Da said to Nilu. “See how he treats me? Your house, he says. Is it not your house? Don’t you have any right to my property? No, I can’t accept rent from you.”
The father and the son began quarreling, and before their exchange became heated, Nilu intervened. “Ganga Da, why don’t we come up with a compromise? We will pay you rent, but if you wish you can put that money in the bank, in Maitreya’s name.”
